Journal ofAdvertising, vol. 37, no. 4 (Winter 2008), pp. 121–130.© 2008 American Academy of Advertising. All rights reserved.ISSN 0091-3367 / 2008 $9.50 + 0.00.DOI 10.2753/JOA0091-3367370410Creativity research in advertising is at a revolutionary stage and frameworks are needed to better understand why some advertising campaigns are more creative than others (Sasser and Koslow 2006). One strategy is to look to other interdisciplin-ary research streams involving management of knowledge and apply these models to the study of advertising production. For example, Cohen and Levinthal’s (1990) absorptive capacity of the fi rm could be used to explain how agencies source and acquire heterogeneous knowledge from outside the fi rm, which they then transform and exploit within the fi rm to design unique and useful solutions for clients. One could also consider the theoretical concept of increasing returns of learning whereby successful fi rms remain competitive by learning faster or work-ing more intelligently through knowledge management (see Sarvary 1999). Finally, one could even approach advertising production as managing the internal climate of the agency to stimulate the transformation of knowledge (Amabile et al. 1996; Shalley, Zhou, and Oldham 2004).A caveat of this approach, however, is that advertising production typically registers on the upper end of the distri-bution of creative potential, so some of these ideas may not be as relevant. Since much of the management literature focuses on how to move organizations from slightly below average to slightly above average creativity, the best performers of this spectrum are neglected. Advertising agencies produce work that is often near the upper reaches of creativity, surpassing such boundaries, meaning that different parameters may be required for this fi eld.One goal of this study is to demonstrate that advertising agencies that do win awards tend to achieve this award-winning status over time. This illustrates the point that award-winning agencies have a creative capability that allows them to produce excellent work on a sustained basis. Another objective was to further examine Amabile et al.’s (1996), KEYS (assessing the climate for creativity) framework concerning the organizational climate for creativity. Findings show that either the hypoth-esized effects are not signifi cant, or even more surprisingly, that they are in the opposite direction than anticipated. Although advertising agencies may have some kind of expertise, skill, or capacity to replicate their success over time, there are no fi rm conclusions as to the reason for why this might be the case. A caveat may be that applying general creativity manage-ment theory to advertising production may be less than ideal because of the different contextual environmental settings and variables. Or it could be that the paradoxes of creativity are even more puzzling than researchers previously thought. In any case, to set the tone for this research, a brief review of advertising production is summarized based on existing advertising creativity literature.CREATIVITY IN THE ADVERTISING LITERATUREA closer look at the literature in advertising/marketing accen-tuates different perspectives of how researchers view creativity Willem Verbeke (Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania) is a profes-sor of sales and account management as well as knowledge-based marketing. He is also founder and director of the Institute for Sales and Account Management (ISAM), Erasmus University, Rotterdam, Netherlands. Philip Hans Franses (Ph.D., University of Groningen, Netherlands) is a professor at and the dean of the School of Economics, Erasmus University, Rotterdam, Netherlands. Arthur le Blanc (Master’s Degree in Marketing, Erasmus Uni-versity, Netherlands) is a consultant at Accenture, Amsterdam, Netherlands. Nienke van Ruiten (Master’s Degree in Marketing, Erasmus Uni-versity, Netherlands) is European Marketing Manager at Philips, Amsterdam, Netherlands. FINDING THE KEYS TO CREATIVITY IN AD AGENCIESUsing Climate, Dispersion, and Size to Examine Award PerformanceWillem Verbeke, Philip Hans Franses, Arthur le Blanc, and Nienke van RuitenABSTRACT: This paper develops a framework to examine how ad agencies can continuously generate creative output, where creative output estimated by ad agencies winning awards over time. The data are collected from 68 Dutch ad agencies with a total of 1,450 clients over a four-year period in the Netherlands. Findings show that ad agencies with creative climates high in both organizational encouragement and workload pressure but low in both work group support and suffi cient resources predicts why ad agencies win awards over time. In addition, ad agencies with a portfolio of clients that consists of market leaders and that operate within a limited amount of industries (limited heterogeneity) also predict creative award propensity and momentum over time. Suggestions for future research are offered.
